The Senate Appropriations Committee proposes to impose onerous new paperwork requirements on millions of workers who file their own tax returns and claim certain tax credits. In particular, the proposed requirement would convert the already complicated one-page Schedule EIC into a four- or five-page form that all individuals preparing their own returns and qualifying for the...

The Earned Income Tax Credit’s impact in reducing poverty is even greater than previously recognized, due to its strong effect in bringing more single mothers into the labor force, striking new research released last week shows.

Standard estimates of the Earned Income Tax Credit’s (EITC) anti-poverty impact measure the number of people the EITC lifts out of poverty by simply comparing...

A range of proposals related to the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) have emerged in recent weeks, including a congressional proposal to restore the minimum wage to about half of the median wage and Warren Buffett’s call for a major EITC expansion. They share the laudable goal of...

The President’s new tax proposals would raise revenues from high-income and wealthy filers and devote much of the savings to other tax proposals that would benefit low- and moderate-income filers. Estimates from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) show that the President’s proposals are...

Update, January 7: We’ve updated this post to reflect information in a new Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House bill.

While political leaders often stretch the truth to make their case, they usually don’t claim the opposite of the truth. That, however, is essentially what Republican congressional leaders are doing by claiming that a measure before the...

Even as the Treasury Department’s Inspector General noted a significant overpayment rate in the refundable part of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) this week, lawmakers chose — in the pending 2015 government funding agreement — to weaken the IRS’s ability to reduce errors in this credit and other parts of the tax code by once again cutting IRS funding to enforce and ensure compliance with...

Update, June 20: We’ve updated the graph, below, to correct an error in the display of data.

New data never before systematically collected and reported show that thousands of schools across the country have very high concentrations of poor students. States provided the data as part of the new
community eligibility provision of the school lunch...